Tag Archives: BANANAS!

The banana synth was as popular as on the Saturday – the only thing we changed there was to replace some of the blacker bananas. We did tweak a few other things elsewhere though…

Being 2 members of staff down, we couldn’t run the BANANAS! Adventures movie-making activity – but it did mean that the Monkey Maze saw a lot more action.

Masks too, of course:

Once suitably attired, our intrepid trained monkeys entered the perilous maze, ready to be guided around the numerous hazards. That was the plan, anyway: it was interesting to watch how one dad’s idea to send a monkey under the ginormous spider’s web propagated throughout the rest of the day!

This became so much of a thing that some trained monkeys became deaf to any instructions that seemed to be guiding them in any other direction!

Meanwhile we had a couple of extremely dedicated MaKey MaKey tinkerers. We really liked their systematic exploration of all that was possible!

We learned a lot too – for example the grounding properties of the building itself!

Over at the video game area, we had set things up so that the trigger pads for controlling the monkey we some large tin-foil patches taped to the ground just that little bit too far away from each other.

It was great watching families and other groups (we had a Brownie six(?) in at one point) figuring out ways to work together to play the game.

We loved the way this introduced more team-working, creativity and movement.

Greeting people as they entered the space was our banana synth. We had a few stars happy to have a tinkle, as well as others who explored playing music via their face; seeing how many bananas they could trigger at once (this also required use of the face); and how long a chain of people they could use to play notes.

We had a good selection of monkey masks made, and when suitable kitted up, trained monkeys were sent into the perilous maze to avoid the dangers and try and find the banananananananas of myth and legend.

We also had a table full of experimentation with MaKey MaKey circuits, pencil traces and pineapples.

Skills learned here were then transferred to a selection of monkey and banana-related video games that needed funkier controllers.

Meanwhile, various other bananas could be seen having various exploits around the building as people made some action adventure movies with them.

The good news is we get to do it all again tomorrow between 11 and 2. Come and join us – we think the banana synth alone is worth the journey!

There’s lots to get ready: from giant fruit and projected video games through to mask templates and novelty synthesisers. But the plus side is that we have to test them all and come up with all the cool ideas (well the first layer, anyway – we’re sure you’ll add plenty more inventiveness on top of what we start off with!).

Here are some photos from our initial planning meeting:

It wasn’t long before other people in the office were coming over to see what was going on. Turns out Dave-from-Marketing’s got some latent musical talent, too!

We’ll be using MaKey MaKey for a couple of the activities and we’re anticipating them being, shall we say, quite energetic, so I’ve also started making an extension/fortification board to a) make things a bit more robust b) make it easier to access as many different inputs as possible and c) provide a way of connecting a variety of different leads.